New Yahoo director is a veteran of the small screen

There is a Bay Area connection behind Yahoo Inc. founder Jerry Yang’s decision last week to recruit veteran telecommunications executive Maggie Wilderotter as a director to help shake up the Sunnyvale portal.

Wilderotter, the respected 52-year-old chairwoman and CEO of Citizens Communications Co. in Stamford, Conn., which provides telephone and Internet service in more than 20 states, built her reputation at AT&T Inc., McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. and Microsoft Corp. But she also spent a memorable chunk of her 25-year career at an interactive television startup in Alameda called Wink Communications Inc., where she showed off a bevy of skills: a solid grasp of business and technology, deep industry knowledge, a politician’s talent for sizing up situations and a Rolodex filled with more powerful connections than a power plant.

One of a handful of women running major technology ventures, Wilderotter tapped all of her strengths in a tireless effort to bring a big revolution to the small screen. Interactive television wasn’t an easy pitch in the late 1990s. But Wilderotter risked her career on a tiny, unknown startup with little funding but some promising technology. It wasn’t out of character. She had a history of gambling on new technology. She joined a cable upstart in the late 1970s before the industry began to dominate the airwaves. She jumped to McCaw Cellular Communications in the early 1990s, long before cell phones wired the world. In 1997, she decided interactive television was ready for prime time.

Wink was working on a service that allowed you to interact with the television shows or commercials you watch through your cable or satellite set-top box. The idea was to allow viewers to click on Wink’s blinking “I” icon on their television screen during a show to pull up news headlines or weather forecasts or to request car brochures or coupons for laundry detergent.

So Wilderotter talked cable and satellite operators into delivering interactive programming. She persuaded all the major networks and other broadcasters to put interactive enhancements into their programming and to allow advertisers to air these enhancements in their commercials. She lobbied sports leagues and Hollywood studios to step up to the plate. She recruited advertisers and their agencies. And she convinced manufacturers to “Wink-enable” their set-top boxes and server platforms.

She was so effective Wilderotter even got credit from competitors for evangelizing interactive television to a reticent audience of networks and advertisers with little incentive to develop interactive content, which had yet to prove its value. She got big industry players to take meetings. She coddled customers like they were her own children. One Weather Channel executive commented: “Maggie cannot be denied.” After all, this was an executive who in the mid-1980s flew cross country in stormy weather when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant with her first child to get sign a major deal with a cable operator.

The Jersey shore native with a passion for Bruce Springsteen could also raise money with the best of them. Shortly after joining Wink she helped raise $34.5 million, including $10 million from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s investment arm Vulcan Ventures. In mid-1998, Wilderotter made the difficult decision to cancel Wink’s planned initial public offering out of concern over volatile market conditions. Instead, she helped Wink raise another $59.5 million in private funding in June 1999, including $30 million from Microsoft, an investment that took nine months for Wilderotter to close. Two months later, Wink made a splash in the public markets, raising $76 million. In its first day of trading, Wink’s stock more than doubled from its initial public offering price of $16 to close at $35.69, giving the company a market value of $1 billion. That jubilation was short-lived.

Wink never got a happy ending. Ultimately it crashed with the force of a 747, enraging shareholders and disappointing employees. After Wink was sold, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recruited Wilderotter to expand its government and educational markets. Wilderotter then went on to Citizen and earned a seat on the board of Xerox. Now she is setting her mind to recharging Yahoo, which runs one of the world’s most popular sites but has suffered from sagging profit and direction.

Another challenging assignment for a veteran of challenging assignments. We certainly plan to tune in.